So we have setup a satellite out at a remote location to bring internet to the employee's of a resort. Problem is that out of the 20 paying customers we have, a few of them seem to find it cool to share login information with their friends who don't want to pay. So instead of having 20 connected machines, we have 40+ or so. In order to cut down on the number of free-loaders we figured we would put in a router that is capable of allowing individuals the ability to login for internet access. If possible even allocate each user a maximum amount of bandwidth for the month or day and/or the ability to throttle them. The connection we have out there is only a 3mbps connection and as you can imagine, being split 20 ways (at worst) is tough, but its the best we can do in their location.

Unfortunately I've been unsuccessful at finding a decent router that has something like a Web Proxy server built into the firmware perhaps /shrug. We are looking for something similar to what you would find at a hotel or in an airport. When you logon to the "Open Wifi" the system requires you to sign in or sign up for an account.

We have attempted MAC filtering, IP Reservation and a variety of other features that either just don't work on our current DIR-825 or are flawed in some way.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

There's something called ChiliSpot that is built into DD-WRT and optional in OpenWRT. There's a couple third-party builds of Tomato Firmware that offer similar "captive portal" capability, the Victec RAF mod and the Toastman mod.

IMO you should look for a router that can be flashed to use one or more of these firmwares.

edit: ChiliSpot itself appears to be dead, but there are a couple forks: CoovaChili and PepperSpot.

Thanks for the heads up, I went ahead and flashed the router over to DD-WRT (v24 SP2) as recommend on the hardware list.

It still includes Chillispot along with a list of other "Hot Spot" services. What is bothering the hell out of me is that the DIR-825 is listed as having 64mb of ram and 8mb of flash rom... so it should be able to run the full DD-WRT as the wiki suggests. However we had an odd issue with a USB TrendNet nic (The small micro sized ones). Whenever the device was attempting to connect or was even plugged in it would knock other wireless devices off of the wireless and the router was unusable. I'm just chalking that experience up to a crappy NIC that causes interference.

The larger issue we have is that when we attempt to remote manage the router we are prompted for a username/password, we enter the correct info and the router locks up. At the time we have the router web gui opened on the LAN with 192.168.1.1 with no issues. The second that we try to connect from a remote location using the open world IP and the proper port number the local web gui stops responding until we press STOP on the browser. Suddenly the LAN connection snaps back into being normal. Its a similar effect that you would get if you DDOS attacked the router externally.

I have tried to disable HHTPS thinking that encryption may be bringing the router to its knees, I've changed the port number to something other than the default (even common ports like 21 or 80). I've logged out of the local web gui completely... Nothing seems to make this router remotely manageable. Anyone run into an issue like this with DD-WRT. We also noticed that no matter what we did on the original D-Link firmware that we had similar difficulties with remote management services not working at all.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

For what it's worth, back when I was looking for which 3rd-party firmware to put on my router I'd read that the main difference between Tomato and DD-WRT is that the former is more stable, while the latter is more featureful. Perhaps one of the Tomato mods might work better?

I ran across the same information about the two "Distros" also. Also in that reading I noticed many users claimed Tomato was not updated nearly as often and didn't support nearly as many routers as DD-WRT. Seems like I'm to choose the lesser of the two evils, hell it can't be worse than the already broken stock firmware....... right?

The wireless seemed to work decent, I've not ran any sort of "benchmarking" tools on the router to check its performance compared to stock. Are there any programs out there specifically designed to test wireless/wired LAN and WAN performance? We have 3 stock DIR-825's that I would love to test out against the DD-WRT one. If the flashed firmware proves to be stable and do what we want I may flash the others over :|.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943